Benazir Bhutto

Her last words

FEW ironies could be more bitter than the publication of a book on reconciliation shortly after its author has been murdered. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated late last year while campaigning for an election in Pakistan, now due to be held on February 18th. She had just returned from eight years in exile, some of which she had spent on this book. “Reconciliation” seeks to resolve “two historic clashes unfolding in the world today”: one within her religion, Islam, and the other between Islam and the West. It is a noble if Utopian aim. Bhutto was nothing if not ambitious.

Yet she seemed uniquely qualified for the task. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she was at home in the West, but also the first woman ever elected (twice, in fact) to head an Islamic government. The Pakistan People's Party—which her father founded, she inherited and her widower is now leading into the election—is the country's most popular secular political force, repeatedly trouncing Islamist parties.

Much of this book's argument has been rehearsed before. Bhutto defends Islam's liberal, tolerant traditions. The first person to embrace the religion, she points out, was a woman, Bibi Khadijah, later to become the Prophet's wife. And she debunks as “convenient and simplistic” the notion that Islam and democracy are somehow incompatible. Yet her own political overview of Muslim countries tends also to be rather simplistic.

She tackles head-on the thesis of Samuel Huntington's essay and book, “The Clash of Civilisations”, declaring herself a “reconciliationist”, not a “clasher”. She even proposes her blueprint for reconciliation: a kind of Islamic Marshall plan, using the petrodollars of the Gulf and the riches of the West, Japan and China to assist “the Islamic world to leap into modernity”.

The observation that economic backwardness fuels anti-Western feeling and fanaticism, however, is hardly new. Familiar, too, is her analysis of the culpability of the West in propping up dictators where they seem strategically useful, undermining its claims to be promoting democracy. The victims of this hypocrisy include, of course, her own country, which, like a recent cover of this newspaper, she calls “the most dangerous place in the world”. Her effort to make it safer led her last year to negotiate with Pervez Musharraf, the president she had long reviled as an unprincipled military dictator. She recounts the pragmatic haggling that enabled her return, at the expense, her critics would argue, of the unity of the civilian democratic opposition.

Here as elsewhere in this book and in Bhutto's autobiography, “Daughter of the East”, there is a tension between the fervour of her expressed ideals and the reality of her political life. Her refusal to acknowledge any mistakes during her deeply disappointing stints as prime minister may be inevitable in a campaigning politician. But it made it hard to share her enthusiasm for what she might achieve at the third attempt.

That attempt, however, was an act of enormous bravery. The first chapter of this book is her account of her disastrous homecoming last October. A bomb attack on her motorcade in Karachi left 179 people dead. The most chilling detail in her narrative is that she believed one of the bombs came in the form of plastic explosives concealed in the clothes of a baby in the crowd, dressed in her party's colours.

Whatever the bomb-delivery mechanism, the atrocity made it even plainer that to continue campaigning would put her own life at risk. She may not have had the answer to Pakistan's problems, let alone the world's, but Benazir Bhutto was nothing if not courageous.